The overly-simplified crux of all projects funded by the MSP program is that by conducting professional development for teachers (using specific guidelines), positive impacts can be seen on student achievement in math and science. Lots of data is collected, and classroom observations of teaching practice is a major component; thus, observation protocols are a big deal for this type of project.
I attended a session sponsored by Horizon Research on a new classroom-observation protocol/tool they are developing. It's not yet published, the draft we got had "DO NOT Copy, Cite, or Distribute" all over it, so I won't name it or provide a lot of detail on what it actually involved. Overall I liked to tool, it's better than the one we are using for the project that I manage, so I'm interested to see what the final version looks like when it becomes available. But there was one statement that the presenters made, out-loud and in their slides, that really made me scratch my head in light of the reading and discussion we've had in LTMS525 thus far, and that statement was:
"[name of tool] is the only classroom observation
protocol that is explicitly aligned with learning
theory."
And I said to myself… "Um.. WHICH learning theory? because I KNOW from my reading that there is more than theory, and they are very different! If we were observing a classroom where learning was being measured through the lens of behaviorism, it might look a LOT different from a classroom where learning is being viewed through cognitivism." And the more I thought about that, the more it started to get under my skin. Here we are, at a conference of educational researchers, in a presentation conducted BY educational researchers, and we're in a session using the term "learning theory" as if it is ONE theory? What's wrong with this picture? You couldn't tell us which theory? Not even a hint? Because I'm sure we would have understood, at least vaguely, if you had tried -- we're all educated in education.
Naturally, I didn't synthesize these questions until after the session had ended, so I didn't get a chance to ask the presenters. So when I got home, I even tried googling "learning theory," "learning theory as jargon," and a few other phrases to see if there was another, more generic use of the phrase "learning theory" that is used euphemistically or as shorthand or something like that. Nothing turned up. Even Wikipedia's entry for "learning theory" goes to "learning theories" and a page that summarizes them in a manner not unlike Chapter 1 of our text.
That, in turn, made me wonder if this particular usage of "learning theory" was meant as a hook for marketing purposes. "Hey, check this new thing out, it's aligned to learning theory!" and everyone goes "ooooh, ahhhh, niiiiiice." (Kind of like the phrase "gluten free" is showing up on so many consumer products now, and there have been no real changes/removal of gluten from those products, we're just highlighting the fact that there isn't gluten. If you know about gluten, you KNOW that yogurt, water, and corn chex cereal is and always was gluten free. Sorry, different soapbox, it just amuses/annoys me.)
So anyway, I do have a draft of the observation tool, and although it says "DO NOT copy, cite, or distribute" it doesn't say ANYthing about "do not pick apart to try to find the alignment to whatever learning theory you can find" so I plan to do that at some point, just to satisfy my own curiosity. I don't mean to call Horizon Research out on this, but I AM curious (and a little suspicious, as you may have gathered) about this point. If I can figure anything out, I'll post a followup to this post.
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